The present invention relates to a slitter suitable for cutting sheets which are output from a desktop-size printing machine.
Generally, commercially available electrophotographic desk-top printers, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,553,528 which are available at low cost are designed to output letter size pages. Of course, these printers have been used to make documents much smaller than a full-page size, such as, from about one-third to one-half the size of a full page in order to produce post cards. One problem with producing post cards with this method is the curl that results and this is especially so with the use of 90 pound sheets. This curl can impede high speed zip code readers/sorters and other machines and create jams. It would therefore be desirable to provide, as an add-on to a standard design of an electrophotographic desktop printer, a device which can take full sheet output from the printer and cut each sheet into post card size without the resulting curl. One type of device which performs this cutting is called a xe2x80x9cslitter.xe2x80x9d
A slitter is a device which accepts a sheet in a process direction, and cuts the sheet being fed therethrough in a direction parallel to the process direction. Various designs of such slitters are well-known in the art, and include such early patents as U.S. Pat. Nos. 244,845; 325,812; 391,750; 393,535; 416,826; and 3,122,040. U.S. Pat. No. 4,559,855, or U.S. Pat No. 5,049,929, both assigned to the assignee hereof, can be seen as disclosing xe2x80x9cdedicatedxe2x80x9d slitters, wherein the function of the slitter is built into a relatively large-scale
According to one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a removable, portable, post slit decurler and high capacity stacker module for use with cut sheets emitted in an output direction toward a slit output nip of a printing machine after they have been slit and with a predetermined curl. The removable, portable, post slit decurler and high capacity stacker module includes a decurler device; a slit output nip downstream of the decurler device; a deflection baffle positioned between the decurler device and the slit output nip for effecting a reverse curl in the cut sheets to thereby straighten them; and a receiver for receiving and stacking the cut sheets.